Raytheon’s Patriot surface-to-air missile (SAM) system has shot down seven Russian Kh-47 Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic missiles over Ukraine in the past few weeks. The success was confirmed by Colonel Serhiy Yaremenko, commander of the 96th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade. “No one was sure that the Patriot was capable of destroying a Kh-47. Ukrainians proved it,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, the Patriot system has seldom met expectations. Its kill ratio was far from 100 percent in the Gulf Wars, and more recently, over Saudi Arabia against Scud-class tactical ballistic missiles fired by Houthi rebels from Yemen, despite the latest PAC-3 version being billed as having such capability. It had apparently never been tested in the U.S. against a hypersonic threat. “It was not a requirement…but it turns out Patriot has some capability,” Vice-Admiral Jon Hill, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told a Senate hearing recently. “It’s got the natural ability [to intercept hypersonic missiles] because it is a cruise missile killer,” he added.
Joe DeAntona, executive director of defense capabilities at Raytheon told AIN, “Today’s Patriot might look like the original 1983 version, but it’s now fully digitized.” He added that the company learned lessons from engagements 10 years ago and that a radar that viewed sector-by-sector, in turn, was not good enough. A gallium nitride-based AESA radar was developed with two rear-panel arrays to provide 360-degree coverage against maneuvering targets. Meanwhile, the missiles that are provided by Lockheed Martin have been upgraded. The PAC-3 is a new “hit-to-kill” interceptor, with an active radar head.
The U.S. has so far provided two Patriot batteries to Ukraine to defend Kyiv. A first engagement on May 4 intercepted a single Kh-47. Days later, six more were detected at a range of 125 miles and all were destroyed, the last at just nine miles and seconds before impact. Ukraine has both the PAC-3 missile and the previous PAC-2 version. The country is also facing attacks from the Iskander hypersonic ballistic missile, from which the Kinzhal was derived.
Raytheon chief executive Greg Hayes told the Wall Street Journal that he was surprised at how effective the Patriot had become. He said that Ukraine has tweaked the system’s software to track and destroy hypersonic missiles flying twice as fast as it was designed for. He also noted that his company was increasing annual production to 12, and plans to deliver five more to Ukraine by the end of next year.
Eric Maule, another Raytheon defense specialist, told AIN that it had taken only weeks to train the Ukrainian soldiers on the Patriot system. That’s presumably because they came with previous experience—Ukraine has Russian-supplied S-300 SAMs. Maule said that training a U.S. soldier from scratch takes a year: six months of basic training, then six months more on their assigned unit.
The newly-found Patriot capability does not come cheaply. According to U.S. Army budget documents, each system costs about $1 billion. Admiral Hill told U.S. senators that each missile costs $4 million. This raises the thorny question of the “cost-exchange ratio.” DeAntona said, that even if the incoming missile cost only $50,000, if it was headed for a multi-million dollar target on the ground, its destruction by Patriot would be worthwhile. “In any case,” he added, “we’re good at discriminating missiles, and where they are going.”